when I was hurrying to avoid being late for school.  Another time was when I was about 24, and was extremely anxious to fill an appointment for which I was late.  So copious was the emission that I had to go home and change.

“As a medical student, the first reference bearing definitely on the subject of sexual inversion was made in the class of Medical Jurisprudence, where certain sexual crimes were alluded to—­very summarily and inadequately—­but nothing was said of the existence of sexual inversion as the ‘normal’ condition of certain unhappy people, nor was any distinction drawn between the various non-normal acts, which were all classed together as manifestations of the criminal depravity of ordinary or insane people.  To a student beginning to be acutely conscious that his sexual nature differed profoundly from that of his fellows, nothing could be more perplexing and disturbing, and it shut me up more completely in my reserve than ever.  I felt that this teaching must be based on some radical error or prejudice or misapprehension, for I knew from my own very clear remembrance of my own development that my peculiarity was not acquired, but inborn; my great misfortune undoubtedly, but not my fault.

“It was still more unfortunate that in the course of the lectures on Clinical Medicine there was not the slightest allusion to the subject.  All sorts of rare diseases—­some of which I have not yet met with in the course of twenty-one years of a busy practice—­were fully discussed, but we were left entirely ignorant of a subject so vitally important to me personally, and, as it seems to me, to the profession to which I aspired.  There might have been an incidental reference to masturbation—­although I do not remember it—­but its real significance received no attention; and what we students knew of it was the result of our reading or of our personal experiences.

“In the class of Mental Disease there was, naturally, more detailed and systematic reference to facts in the sexual life and to sexual inversion as a rare pathological condition.  But still there was not a comforting word to reassure me, growing ever more hopelessly ashamed of what it seemed was a criminal or a gravely morbid nature.

“Among all my fellow-students I knew of no one constituted like myself; but my natural reserve—­increased, of course, by my consciousness of what I saw would be thought to be a criminal tendency—­did not urge me to exchange of confidences or to the formation of; close friendships.

“After graduation I became a resident medical officer in the hospital and private assistant to one of the professors—­a physician and teacher of worldwide reputation.  With him I associated on the most cordial and affectionate terms; and often in the course of conversation I tried to bring him to discuss the subject, but without success.  It was obviously unpleasant and